Collisions 6: Etna St

Even once our clients are housed, the struggle continues. Many of them have lived surrounded by people for so long that being alone is jarring. The silence lets their thoughts creep in. Sometimes the guilt gets to people who can’t forget their friends out on the street and they move everyone in, which can quickly lead to chaos. Figuring out money and how to feed themselves and pay the bills on the impossibly small amounts of assistance the government doles out sinks some people, and budgeting not just money but time gets to others. And then there are neighbors. People who qualify for mental health housing often wind up in buildings where some or all of the other apartments are occupied by other people with complicated minds. Conflicts over issues real and less real erupt. Queer clients are sometimes faced with homophobic neighbors. A. used to come in often complaining about being targeted by her neighbors. Some of the complaints made less sense than others, like her insistence that her neighbors purposely made the ceiling leak only when she was home. She got trapped in a cycle of blaming her neighbors, being hostile to them, conflicts escalating. Finally the nonprofit in charge of her building decided to move her. And that’s how on a regular Tuesday afternoon, both of us wilting in the August heat, she wound up telling me her new address: Etna St in Cypress Hills. I froze for a moment, pen suspended a quarter inch from the paper I meant to write her new address on. I started to feel nauseous, blamed the heat, sent her downstairs to get some lunch, closed the door and fell back through time, crash landing in June of 2016. 2016 had been a struggle since November, when a sudden, severe pain in my lower back took up residence and refused to budge. The day after Thanksgiving, standing at the bathroom sink, my foot felt strange, like it had been replaced by one made of clay. I looked down and realized that my food was facing outward and no matter what, I could not bring it inward. The foot was permanently stuck in first position, like a twisted echo of the many years I spent standing at the barre in a black leotard and salmon tights. The next day, the other foot turned numb, the progression fast and frightening. And then my balance started to go on the fritz. I thought of what the ballet teacher used to tell us, think of a string from the top of your head to the ceiling, but my body was disconnecting from my mind, out of control. My walking turned into frankensteinish lurch, feet wide apart. Then I started to fall, legs crumpling unexpectedly, leaving me in a heap on the kitchen floor or the sidewalk or, eventually, in the middle of Christopher St and 7th Ave on my way to work. By then it was deep into winter, and the pavement was so cold that it soaked through your clothes. Tests and appointments started taking over my life like an invasive plant, growing exponentially while the garden of my every day life was forced to the margins, struggling to exist. Brain scans, MRIS of various parts of the spine, evil tests where excruciating zaps of electricity were shot into the nerves, setting some on fire and getting no response at all from those that were dead. Many befuddled specialists had nothing to offer. My high school boyfriend’s retired parents, a former OR nurse and a retired Marxist public defender, became the organizing force behind all this, driving me from appointment to appointment. In waiting rooms and exam rooms, his mother sat, asking questions that I was past the point of being able to formulate, while his Dad brought the car around and plotted where to eat, all the while making it clear that 27 years after I broke up with their son, despite my queerness and his wife, I was still their preferred daughter in law. In the meantime, my actual partner was so afraid of what was happening to me, that she was just a space where a person should have been. I had always been the person who took care of things, took care of her. I earned the money, cooked the meals, cleaned up the rubble of her manic episodes. I tried to keep doing the things we always did, showing up at her place for the weekend, gripping on to the counter with one hand so I didn’t fall while cooking. And then it was the middle of June and a hate filled maniac went on a killing spree at the Pulse nightclub at 2am on a Sunday morning. She and I reacted to the horror differently. She turned quiet, wrestling with the pain and sorrow internally, while I turned outward, immersing myself in the activist community that had long been my solace. Wednesday we went out for dinner, mozzarella and tomato sandwiches with thick, deep balsamic at our favorite sidewalk cafe with the Verrazano looming in the backward. It wasn’t just the Pulse massacre, she was also back in school, struggling with chemistry and feeling her dreams of becoming a nurse, getting off disability, breaking out of poverty slipping away. I could see her distress in the way her words took time to arrive, as though they were traveling a distance, in the slowness of her motions, like her limbs were moving through water. In my work brain, I know the name for this, psychomotor retardation, often a symptom of severe depression. But I was not at work and that was not my place in her life. So I asked her if she had an appointment with her therapist, and reassured that she was seeing both her and her treasured primary doc the next day, I paid the bill and let her go, disappearing into the subway. The next day was the first mtg of Gays Against Guns and I crammed myself into an overcrowded room at The Center, immersing myself in the collective effort to create a response. It was late when we finished, and she went to bed early, so I didn’t reach out. And in the morning, I got up and in the whirlwind of a day at work, I didn’t notice her silence. Saturday I got up and was robotically preparing to go to her house like I did every weekend, when her mother reached out to me. Had I heard from her? Judy wanted to know. I realized I hadn’t and neither had anyone else. I threw on my shoes, jumped in a car service and headed to Cypress Hills, a solid 45 min away. On the way I got hold of the downstairs neighbor she had befriended like she did everyone she came across, from the people in her therapy groups to the Tibetan fruit vendor down the block. Raquel had a key, so she could watch the cat. She went up, her slippers shuffling on the stairs. And then a long silence. “I don’t think she’s breathing,” she said. Everything went still. I was there and not there and everywhere at once. Then I crash landed back in the car service with a worried driver eyeing the tears that had started pouring down my face without me knowing. We pulled up to her building, I could see a commotion, the front doors were propped open, police cars were lined up at the curb. But the ambulance was just sitting there, no need for sirens or flashing lights or urgency. I went in the building, the neighbors out in the halls observing the chaos knew who I was but just stood in silence. Bursting through her door, keys in my hand, I made a beeline for her bedroom only to be stopped in my path by the navy uniformed outstretched arm of a police officer. “You don’t want to go in there,” he said. The door was open slightly but all I could see was her arm, dangling limply from the bed. “Call her family,” an officer said, maybe the first one or another, I had no idea, reality was splitting rapidly, 21 years in shattered shards. “I’ve been waiting for this call for decades,” her mother said, and part of me agreed, it wasn’t the first or even the third time a call had sent me flying to her side, to ERs and ICUs. But she had always survived, and somehow, logic suspended, I believed she always would. “You have to wait for the ME” said a cop, so I did, a wait that might have been years. The ME went in her bedroom, came over to me and held out a screen. The picture was of her arm, her tattoo, The Giving Tree, that covered the scars on her arm that she was tired of explaining. “Her face is unrecognizable,” he said, words that would repeat and repeat in my mind. I identified her by the tattoo. She had seized from the overdose, hit her head on the bedframe and wound up sideways, facedown with her head hanging. They didn’t explain all that, but when I cleaned out her apartment, and moved the bed, the puddle of dried blood on the floor made it clear. Back in my chair, in my office, in 2025, the dangling arm, the words, the blood on the floor clicked back into place in their compartments in my mind and my vision cleared. I looked down at the address I had written. 371 Etna St. My client’s new life was beginning in the building where Kate’s had ended.